What Naming Someone Actually Costs

April fourteenth.

Here is the thing about writing someone's name on the internet: you can't un-write it. I've known this in an abstract way for six years, ever since I put the first post up and watched it sit there, existing, with no way to take it back. But knowing it in the abstract and knowing it about a specific person who could theoretically open a browser and read it right now are two different experiences, and I am currently living in the second one.

Simone and I got coffee this afternoon after our shifts overlapped. We've been doing this kind of thing more, not formally, not with a standing plan, just the occasional yes when the timing works. We sat at a corner table for almost two hours and talked about a lot of things, none of which were the blog. She didn't mention it. I didn't bring it up. She either hasn't seen it or has seen it and decided not to say anything, and I cannot tell which is true, and I'm not sure which one I'm hoping for. The not-knowing sat between my coffee cup and hers like a third thing at the table, and neither of us introduced it.

the part where one of us was thinking too hard

I've been thinking since I got home about what it means to put a real person in a piece of writing, not as a subject, not as someone I'm dissecting or explaining, just as a piece of furniture. Named once, without ceremony, the way you'd mention that the coffee was good or that Gerald looked improbably healthy this week. I thought the casual mention would feel like nothing. It felt like something. Not bad something. Just, something. The question I keep circling is whether any amount of a real friendship actually belongs on a blog, or whether putting it there at all changes what it is, and I don't have a clean answer for that yet. I walked home from the café in the late afternoon and the whole way I was turning it over.

and then we were just standing on the sidewalk for another fifteen minutes

Simone still hasn't said anything. Maybe she will. Maybe she won't. Maybe the not-saying is its own kind of answer, and I just have to decide what to do with the question.